Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.

The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.

Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.

The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”

Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400

Isnaj Dui – Abstracts On Solitude

CD – Hibernate
The incorporeal beats of “Abstracts On Solitude” give birth to a peculiar ecosystem that burrows deep in our perception, feeding not only on external manifestations. With different releases under her belt – for labels such as Normal, Smallfish, Rural Colours and FBox Records – and with an interesting album project based on monthly releases for subscribers (Duodecim), Katie English, AKA Isnaj Dui, now arrives at Hibernate. This inspired label, specializing in the experimental, abstract and melodic, is a fitting home for the suave bass flute of this London musician, author and instrumentalist. English elegantly combines acoustic sounds with atmospheric patterns, adding in homemade instruments and delicate electronic sequences. The music features subtly docile sound insertions throughout the development of the six tracks. Full of creaks, it incorporates oriental lullabies and generates impressions of large uninhabited spaces. The melodies are always elegant and restrained, guided along gentle resonances that are pleasing in their reverberations, appearing alongside lovely insistent drones. The images evoked are rather mysterious and foggy, dictated by sometimes gloomy tones, elements that become soft and vaporous – but still very dreamlike – subtly tinged with small digital and glitch influences and swarming with shaky equilibriums and dissonances. The contrasts – however – are always mediated, reassembled in a very personal and refined score that never abuses the easy illusion of a simple dichotomous tension of elements.